Sam Smith – Since my 88th birthday about two months ago I have been reflecting on various things I had long ignored. For example, I realize I have now lived longer than at least four generation of my family’s males.
But at the same time, it has
struck me that general society has much less use for me than was the case a few
decades ago. Part of aging is becoming increasingly irrelevant except to
families and close friends. I am, for example, no longer on any board - not that I would want to be.
And many years ago I started
recording the deaths of friends, relatives and folks I had been close to. My list
now has 200 names on it.
I am also struck these days by a little
discussed aspect of history, namely that it can be a transitory time that
eventually gets lost thanks to changes in our collective mood, media coverage, memory and what we do about
it.
I have come to realize that history
is can be a series of events that one performs, reads about or attends and then
either acts upon or forgets. I was
reminded of this the other day thinking about Trump’s war on non-whites and how
the civil rights movement of the 1960s has drifted out of our thinking. What we used to call racism is now part of the
political vision of the right.
The underrated history that really changes things is
that which guides how we think about values and standards. For example, Trump
is in part the product of years of growth
for the language and standards of big business and mass media.
My own life began with presidents
like FD Roosevelt, Harry Truman, JF
Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. They were our presidential standard until Ronald Reagan
substantially changed the American course in 1981. We have seen little
progressive advance since then and now,
45 years later, we are stuck with Donald Trump. Yet we forget what happened in
the 1980s.
The message to keep in mind:
don’t turn over history to the bad guys. It can last longer for them than you
think.
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